


Didactic Scars

by Simply8Steps



Series: Epics Pentathalon [3]
Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Character Study, F/F, Identity Issues, Love Stories are Hard to Tell in this Universe, Love is complicated
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-14
Updated: 2017-06-14
Packaged: 2018-11-14 04:27:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11200428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Simply8Steps/pseuds/Simply8Steps
Summary: Didactic [dahy-dak-tik] (adj.): (1)intended for instruction; instructive; (2) inclined to teach or lecture others too much; (3) teaching or intending to teach a moral lesson// didactics (used with a singular verb) the art or science of teaching. (dictionary.reference.com)





	Didactic Scars

**Author's Note:**

> Posted on LJ 01/01/2013 for the BSG-epics community's Pentathalon. This was the Cylon submission. I obviously have a strange sense of what counts as "shippy", but I just wanted to fix it. I wanted them to find their peace, and darn it, they deserved better, but this fits within canon I think. Most of the characters in BSG deserved better than they got, especially the women. Needless to say, this was my first attempt at this ship.

There is only one happiness in life: to love and to be loved.  
~ George Sand

  
  
The first time Tory fraks Boomer on New Caprica, she does it for any information the skinjob might give away. The first time Boomer fraks Tory, she does it because she is desperate to feel human again – without the pain of knowing that she is not. Instead, she’d like to forget that the Chief loved her once and that Cally is at her mercy, and she feels so human and fragile and betrayed… Perhaps it would be more proper to say that she’s trying to remember how it feels to be human without the burden of knowing that she was (and is) not. It’s everything that she wants and simultaneously fears. (It is the first time she thinks she realizes the rationale behind many of Cavil’s rants and ravings.)  
  
Their moments together are secret, frantic, and forceful – as if they are ripping each other apart for the sake of reaching the brain and heart (and other such vital organs) first.  
  
There is no trust, no pure insanity that could be termed love, but there is _feeling_ all the same, and it marks them beneath the skin.  
  
Traitors.  
  
Betrayer and betrayed, a single letter making a world of difference.   
  
Tory finds herself both frustrated and satisfied by the snippets that Boomer relays – never any critical or vital information, but pieces of the Cylons’ everyday lives that she takes and goes over in her mind again and again to see what she (or Laura) can take advantage of. It is a calculated interaction. Boomer, both knowing and denying the nature of each encounter, makes up her own set of rationalizations - thought processes on the nature of “human” intimacy. They both like to think that they’ve managed to hide just enough, but also give up just enough.   
  
Cavil only smiles placidly when he sees Tory and Boomer passing by each other in the New Caprica thoroughfare as if they do not know each other, as if amused at some inside joke that only he knows (which is true).  
  


* * *

  
Tory is desperate and borderline frantic when she goes to Boomer in the cold light of morning. (It is the first time she has seen Tory’s cool mask shattered, she thinks, and a flare of frustration joins the desperation in Tory’s face.) “They took her,” Tory says, and it almost sounds like begging.   
  
“Who?” Boomer asks even though it’s not really necessary. Her voice is cool, void of worry.   
  
Tory’s eyes are wide, and there are no tears, but her silence is enough of a giveaway, an entreaty. It is a vulnerability too late – too far taken to be given back.  
  
Boomer looks away, and Tory takes that gesture for what it is.   
  
There’s no sound when she leaves, but Boomer remains frozen, staring off at the detention center. The winds are really cold here, she realizes.   
  
She marches off.  
  


* * *

  
She only loses it when she’s confronted with the Chief… with Cally. She’s this non-entity to them. _All_ of these people… They only speak to her, ask her (threaten her if they can) if they are asking for someone else. They always want someone else. She’s a thing, a means to an objective.   
  
At least when she was a soldier, a human soldier, she had people who cared whether or not she’d come back.   
  
She begins to hate it. She hates this planet – this entire failed project. It has only made her feel less than human. There’s nothing she can do for people who don’t even look at her as a person. Her worth and value isn’t as a life, it is as a utility.  
  
She is a machine, might as well accept it.   
  
All the same, she keeps an eye out for Laura Roslin when the marching orders come.   
  
She glimpses her – once – in the back of a canvas covered truck, smiling wryly at Tom Zarek.  
  
Boomer wonders if she should tell Roslin how lucky she is to have Tory. (She wonders if she should tell Roslin “sorry” as well – for fooling her as she had fooled everyone else. One of the first people she fooled post-cylon apocalypse.)  
  
She wonders if she should mention anything to Tory at all.  
  
She stays silent. She stays away.  
  


* * *

  
When Tory remembers who she is, after days of lost and confused wanderings, and reprimands that hurt more than they should (that hurt more because they are true, and Billy’s picture is not a small framed thing on the President’s desk but a full transparent wall standing in front of her every step, in front of her face), she breathes fully for the first time.   
  
It’s not as much of a world-shattering epiphany as it is for the Chief or Sam, but she’s not in as much denial as Tigh either. She simply is, but that’s a technicality she can figure out later.  
  
At least she knows now. (Just one more layer of glass for the wall - this one is shaded by running red lights.)  
  


* * *

  
Tory remembers as she falls – all those moments from New Caprica. It is right before her death, as she struggles for breath, and wonders if she should or should not fight this ('it’s really all too sudden' is her analysis), wonders at the look in the Chief’s eyes and thinks for a second, “This must be what it means to be inhumanly human.”  
  
She has used people, used lives as she herself has been used, and it’s all true. She’s too good at deceiving others to truly deceive herself. She has been a very human machine, and she has been an inhuman human as well. She thinks this is the reason why it’s so hard to tell a cylon from a human. The distinction was blurred in the first place.   
  
She remembers the feelings of being betrayed and of betrayals committed, and she decides perhaps, it’s time to go. Go back to the stream – that stream where she felt a familiar presence – the person who understands best about the choices made when one isn’t quite sure if they doubt or trust themselves.  
  
Sharon’s… Boomer’s soul whispers in her ears to let go.  
  
And she does.  
  


* * *

  
She wakes in the shallows of a stream, and Sharon sits on the shore staring at her. Her hand reaches out, and Tory grabs it, gets pulled to land. The ground is warm – patches of dirt scattered with grass. She wonders if this is what earth should have felt like. (And still, Laura’s dreams are entwined with her own.)  
  
She feels the soft touch of a kiss to her lips. “Open your eyes.”  
  
Tory listens, and sees dark eyes reflecting life back at her. Old wounds being tempered by peace into scars, smoothing their healing. They are marked by their choices. They recognize it in each other now.  
  
They lie down then, to stare at the sky. Exploring and answers can wait for later. For now, it’s their time to rest in the calm after turmoil.

  
_Fin._   
  


I prithee send me back my heart,  
Since I cannot have thine;  
For if from yours you will not part,  
Why, then, shouldst thou have mine?  
~ John Suckling


End file.
